From BERT to GPT-3 Codex: Harnessing the Potential of Very Large Language Models for Data Management
Large language models have recently advanced the state of the art on many natural language processing benchmarks. The newest generation of models can be applied to a variety of tasks with little to no specialized training. This technology creates various opportunities for applications in the context of data management. The tutorial will introduce participants to basic background on language models, discuss different methods to use language models, and give an overview and short demonstration of available libraries and APIs. Models for generating natural language will be considered as well as models, such as GPT-3 Codex, which complete program code or generate code from natural language instructions. Finally, the tutorial will discuss recent research in the database community that exploits language models in the context of traditional database systems or proposes novel system architectures that are based on them. The tutorial is targeted at database researchers. No prior background on language models is required. The goal of the tutorial is to introduce database researchers to the latest generation of language models, and to their use cases in the domain of data management.
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Large language models achieve state-of-the-art performance on sequence generation evaluation, but typically have a large number of parameters. This is a computational challenge as presented by applying their evaluation capability at scale. To overcome the challenge, in this paper, we propose \textbf{ECT}, an \textbf{e}valuation \textbf{c}apability \textbf{t}ransfer method, to transfer the evaluation capability from LLMs to relatively lightweight language models. Based on the proposed ECT, we learn various evaluation models from ChatGPT, and employ them as reward models to improve sequence generation models via reinforcement learning and reranking approaches. Experimental results on machine translation, text style transfer, and summarization tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our ECT. Notably, applying the learned evaluation models to sequence generation models results in better generated sequences as evaluated by commonly used metrics and ChatGPT.
Despite speculation that recent large language models (LLMs) are likely to be used maliciously to improve the quality or scale of influence operations, uncertainty persists regarding the economic value that LLMs offer propagandists. This research constructs a model of costs facing propagandists for content generation at scale and analyzes (1) the potential savings that LLMs could offer propagandists, (2) the potential deterrent effect of monitoring controls on API-accessible LLMs, and (3) the optimal strategy for propagandists choosing between multiple private and/or open source LLMs when conducting influence operations. Primary results suggest that LLMs need only produce usable outputs with relatively low reliability (roughly 25%) to offer cost savings to propagandists, that the potential reduction in content generation costs can be quite high (up to 70% for a highly reliable model), and that monitoring capabilities have sharply limited cost imposition effects when alternative open source models are available. In addition, these results suggest that nation-states -- even those conducting many large-scale influence operations per year -- are unlikely to benefit economically from training custom LLMs specifically for use in influence operations.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalizability, such as understanding arbitrary entities and relations. Instruction tuning has proven effective for distilling LLMs into more cost-efficient models such as Alpaca and Vicuna. Yet such student models still trail the original LLMs by large margins in downstream applications. In this paper, we explore targeted distillation with mission-focused instruction tuning to train student models that can excel in a broad application class such as open information extraction. Using named entity recognition (NER) for case study, we show how ChatGPT can be distilled into much smaller UniversalNER models for open NER. For evaluation, we assemble the largest NER benchmark to date, comprising 43 datasets across 9 diverse domains such as biomedicine, programming, social media, law, finance. Without using any direct supervision, UniversalNER attains remarkable NER accuracy across tens of thousands of entity types, outperforming general instruction-tuned models such as Alpaca and Vicuna by over 30 absolute F1 points in average. With a tiny fraction of parameters, UniversalNER not only acquires ChatGPT's capability in recognizing arbitrary entity types, but also outperforms its NER accuracy by 7-9 absolute F1 points in average. Remarkably, UniversalNER even outperforms by a large margin state-of-the-art multi-task instruction-tuned systems such as InstructUIE, which uses supervised NER examples. We also conduct thorough ablation studies to assess the impact of various components in our distillation approach. We will release the distillation recipe, data, and UniversalNER models to facilitate future research on targeted distillation.
Opinion mining, also known as sentiment analysis, is a subfield of natural language processing (NLP) that focuses on identifying and extracting subjective information in textual material. This can include determining the overall sentiment of a piece of text (e.g., positive or negative), as well as identifying specific emotions or opinions expressed in the text, that involves the use of advanced machine and deep learning techniques. Recently, transformer-based language models make this task of human emotion analysis intuitive, thanks to the attention mechanism and parallel computation. These advantages make such models very powerful on linguistic tasks, unlike recurrent neural networks that spend a lot of time on sequential processing, making them prone to fail when it comes to processing long text. The scope of our paper aims to study the behaviour of the cutting-edge Transformer-based language models on opinion mining and provide a high-level comparison between them to highlight their key particularities. Additionally, our comparative study shows leads and paves the way for production engineers regarding the approach to focus on and is useful for researchers as it provides guidelines for future research subjects.
This paper examines the ethical considerations and implications of large language models (LLMs) in generating content. It highlights the potential for both positive and negative uses of generative AI programs and explores the challenges in assigning responsibility for their outputs. The discussion emphasizes the need for proactive ethical frameworks and policy measures to guide the responsible development and deployment of LLMs.
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. The great promise of LLMs as general task solvers motivated people to extend their functionality largely beyond just a ``chatbot'', and use it as an assistant or even replacement for domain experts and tools in specific domains such as healthcare, finance, and education. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). To fill such a gap, explosively-increase research, and practices have been conducted in very recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs, which, however, calls for a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarizes and guide this promising domain. In this survey paper, first, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. We also present a comprehensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Furthermore, we offer insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.
Recently, the emergence of pre-trained models (PTMs) has brought natural language processing (NLP) to a new era. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of PTMs for NLP. We first briefly introduce language representation learning and its research progress. Then we systematically categorize existing PTMs based on a taxonomy with four perspectives. Next, we describe how to adapt the knowledge of PTMs to the downstream tasks. Finally, we outline some potential directions of PTMs for future research. This survey is purposed to be a hands-on guide for understanding, using, and developing PTMs for various NLP tasks.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
Many natural language processing tasks solely rely on sparse dependencies between a few tokens in a sentence. Soft attention mechanisms show promising performance in modeling local/global dependencies by soft probabilities between every two tokens, but they are not effective and efficient when applied to long sentences. By contrast, hard attention mechanisms directly select a subset of tokens but are difficult and inefficient to train due to their combinatorial nature. In this paper, we integrate both soft and hard attention into one context fusion model, "reinforced self-attention (ReSA)", for the mutual benefit of each other. In ReSA, a hard attention trims a sequence for a soft self-attention to process, while the soft attention feeds reward signals back to facilitate the training of the hard one. For this purpose, we develop a novel hard attention called "reinforced sequence sampling (RSS)", selecting tokens in parallel and trained via policy gradient. Using two RSS modules, ReSA efficiently extracts the sparse dependencies between each pair of selected tokens. We finally propose an RNN/CNN-free sentence-encoding model, "reinforced self-attention network (ReSAN)", solely based on ReSA. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) and Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK) datasets.
In order to answer natural language questions over knowledge graphs, most processing pipelines involve entity and relation linking. Traditionally, entity linking and relation linking has been performed either as dependent sequential tasks or independent parallel tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework called "EARL", which performs entity linking and relation linking as a joint single task. EARL uses a graph connection based solution to the problem. We model the linking task as an instance of the Generalised Travelling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and use GTSP approximate algorithm solutions. We later develop EARL which uses a pair-wise graph-distance based solution to the problem.The system determines the best semantic connection between all keywords of the question by referring to a knowledge graph. This is achieved by exploiting the "connection density" between entity candidates and relation candidates. The "connection density" based solution performs at par with the approximate GTSP solution.We have empirically evaluated the framework on a dataset with 5000 questions. Our system surpasses state-of-the-art scores for entity linking task by reporting an accuracy of 0.65 to 0.40 from the next best entity linker.
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